Taming Water: Engineered Systems Through the Centuries

The story starts in 1370, when Paris built its first underground sewer line beneath the Rue Montmartre; the network that grew from it was repeatedly enlarged, including major expansions under Louis XIV and Napoleon III, and later featured in Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Miserables.

By 1825 canal builders in New York had connected the Hudson River to Lake Erie, completing the first navigable waterway linking the Atlantic Ocean to the upper Great Lakes and sharply cutting the cost of moving people and goods across the Appalachians.

In 1869, after a decade of construction led by French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps and his Compagnie de Suez, engineers opened a sea level waterway across the Isthmus of Suez, joining the Mediterranean and Red Seas and shortening the trade route between Europe and Asia.

The Panama Canal opened in 1914 with a lock system that lifts ships to the artificial Gatun Lake and lowers them again on the far side, a design later honored by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.

Built between 1931 and 1936 across the Colorado River's Black Canyon during the Great Depression, the Hoover Dam took thousands of workers and cost more than 100 lives to complete, and was dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Operational since 1982, the Thames Barrier protects the floodplain of most of Greater London by closing and raising against high tides and storm surges moving up the Thames from the North Sea, then reopening at low tide.

Commissioned in the mid 1970s for metropolitan Chicago, the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan diverts storm water and raw sewage into holding reservoirs to reduce flooding and protect Lake Michigan, ranking among the largest civil engineering projects ever undertaken by cost and scope.

The Three Gorges Dam on China's Yangtze River had its body completed in 2006, and by 2012 the last of its 32 main turbines came online, making it the world's largest power station by installed capacity at 22,500 megawatts.